So why would one want to use TrueOS instead of FreeBSD? When it was still called PC-BSD some people claimed ease of use, but I never understood that; since it used the same ports as FreeBSD, you could install the same ports or packages on FreeBSD.
Now they abandoned this desktop focus. So what is the selling point here?
I use PC-BSD on my desktop. The reason that I chose it over FreeBSD is due to their upgrade process and their use of ZFS boot environments (beadm). And the fact that X "just worked" with their installer.
In terms of packages and uppdates: The way a pkg update on FreeBSD goes is that you do pkg-update && pkg-upgrade, and it updates your packages in place. In PC-BSD, it makes a new clone of your current root environment, and does the upgrade there. It makes this the new boot environment, and at reboot, you boot into the updated system. This is much cleaner, and allows you to easily roll back in the rare event of something blowing up.
I hope TrueOS keeps this.
Ugh, The name reminds me of Tru64 from DEC in the 90s..
This is how it works in FreeBSD too. At least that's how I do it. beadm is not mandatory, nor is used "by default", but it is there, it's the only way I update.
I've experimented with a PC-BSD desktop in the past. It was significantly easier to get going than setting up FreeBSD from scratch. While the FreeBSD documentation is excellent, there's a lot to do to make it a functional graphical desktop, and PC-BSD does all that stuff for you.
Underneath it's still FreeBSD, so I couldn't see any reason not to use it.
Now they abandoned this desktop focus. So what is the selling point here?